Featured Domains

European company with FBA acronym sells FBA.com domain name to Amazon.com.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) has acquired the three-letter domain name FBA.com, most likely because of its popular Fulfillment By Amazon program.

Fulfillment By Amazon, commonly know as just FBA, is a service in which Amazon.com stores, picks, packs and ships products on behalf of other companies. This includes both companies selling products through the Amazon marketplace as well as ecommerce sites that want Amazon to handle fulfillment for them.

There’s another ray of light for those hoping that ICANN will eventually delegate the .Amazon top level domain name to Amazon.com.

Earlier today, ICANN’s Board of Directors instructed the non-profit domain overseer to remove the “Will Not Proceed” status on the .amazon application. (The actual change in the public database hasn’t occurred yet.)

Last month, the Board passed a resolution asking ICANN to act as a mediator between countries in the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) and Amazon.com. These countries are concerned that Amazon.com’s ownership of .Amazon will somehow hurt the region.

Amazon has been negotiating with the countries for many years. It has offered to reserve domains, provide funding for a .amazon website to promote the region, and give $5 million in Amazon goods and services. The ACTO members are unmoved.

The decision to remove the “Will Not Proceed” status is mostly symbolic as ICANN still needs to work with the parties to come up with a compromise.

It will be a big win for new top level domain companies if .Amazon is delegated to the company. Amazon’s usage of the domain will help spread the word that there are new options to the right of the dot.

Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) long battle to get rights to run the .Amazon top level domain name might still pay off, but countries that are part of the Amazon region continue to play hardball.

On Sunday, ICANN’s board resolved to have ICANN continue serve as a sort of mediator between countries such as Brazil and Peru and the United States’ second most valuable company. It wants ICANN to come back with a proposal that will allow the region and company to essentially share the top level domain.

Amazon.com applied to run the .amazon domain name as part of the 2014 top level domain name expansion. It was one of 76 domains the company applied for. Some of the domains were generic in nature, and others were branded domains like .AWS.

Brazil and Peru filed an “early warning” through the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) saying that it was opposed to the application for .Amazon. It argued:

[g]ranting exclusive rights to this specific gTLD to a private company would prevent the use of this domain for the purposes of public interest related to the protection, promotion and awareness raising on issues related to the Amazon biome. It would also hinder the possibility of use of this domain to congregate web pages related to the population inhabiting that geographical region.

(No mention was made to how the region has been hurt by the ecommerce company owning Amazon.com.)

The GAC provided official advice to ICANN that it didn’t approve of the .Amazon domain application, and ICANN rejected Amazon.com’s application as a result.

Amazon.com then tried to work with the member states of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO). Its negotiations failed, and Amazon.com filed for Independent Review of the decision to reject its application. It won that review.

Since then, the company has continued to work with the ACTO to come up with a solution that makes them it comfortable. Its latest proposal includes reserving domains the ACTO would like held back, helping ACTO create a website to promote the region (and funding it), and giving a big, fat $5 million gift card to ACTO member states.

Still, no dice.

The board now wants ICANN to present it with a proposal that will let Amazon.com use the domain for its business purposes but appease ACTO members.

In a battle of hard-headed governments vs. the U.S.’s second biggest company, delay is the big winner.

Historical Whois records at DomainTools show that the domain was transferred to Amazon.com this week, between September 11 and September 12.

The domain name was owned by AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. Although the corporate relationships are a bit convoluted, the seller appears to be part of a company called Earth Networks that runs the site WeatherBug.com. (That’s further convoluted by a company name of GroundTruth on the WeatherBug website). (see updated below)

The oldest Whois record at DomainTools dates to 2001, showing Automated Weather Source as the registrant. But data in the Whois records since then all show a common owner. The domain was registered in 1995.

Amazon’s cloud business is Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short. The company recently started using the dot-brand domain name .AWS in marketing. Although I’m sure it has coveted the AWS.com domain name for many years, I wonder if traffic to the domain has increased since it began marketing domain names like BuildOn.AWS.

AWS.com does not resolve as of this morning.

Update: I received an email from the seller explaining the genesis of the company and why it was confusing to understand the corporate family:

Earth Networks was originally referred to as AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. AWS stood for “Automated Weather Source”. We own and operate the world’s largest network of automated real-time, commercial-grade weather stations, as well as we also operate the world’s largest total lightning network (that can detect both in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning). We also operate an HD camera network and are getting into GHG networks as well. Therefore, our original company website was AWS.com.

We also created, owned, and operated the WeatherBug brand for years (WeatherBug.com and the WeatherBug apps). WeatherBug was the primary front-end gateway the public used to access the richness of our weather networks.

We later changed the name of the company from AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. to Earth Networks to better align with our mission to “take the pulse of the planet”, as well as to further differentiate our weather service offerings from other organizations such as Amazon Web Services (although Earth Networks and Amazon Web Services have enjoyed partnership opportunities). We launched a new company website under earthnetworks.com, although we still had some legacy services tied to the aws.com domain, so we retained ownership of the domain until the sale of the domain to Amazon.

In late 2016, we sold the WeatherBug brand to xAd, Inc., which later changed their company name to GroundTruth. GroundTruth now owns and operates the WeatherBug brand, WeatherBug.com, and WeatherBug apps, although they still power their website with Earth Networks weather data. This link explains the transition:

Earth Networks has now transitioned more into an enterprise weather data services provider. We still own and operate the weather, lightning, camera, and GHG networks, plus we sell solutions that allow customers to install commercial-grade weather stations, lightning sensors, and cameras in their organizations, in addition to also offering enterprise-class weather services from our web-based weather visualization platform Sferic Maps to our weather data Sferic API to other exclusive weather data and alerting capabilities. Some of the most respected organizations across industries are relying on the power of the exclusive, commercial-grade weather data and networks we offer.

Two very large companies made domain name purchases at Sedo over the past week. Amazon.com bought a generic and Statoil, a $74 billion market cap energy company, bought a domain corresponding to one of its projects.

Of course, there were lots of cryptocurrency related purchases as well, led by Bitkey.com for $25,000.